[custom_adv] US forces in Afghanistan abandoned their main base at Bagram airport overnight Friday - shutting off the lights and slipping away into the night without telling government forces who were supposed to take it over. [custom_adv] General Mir Asadullah Kohistani, who is now in charge of the base which for 20 years served as the headquarters for America's war on the Taliban, said he only discovered the Americans had left two hours after they were gone when they called from Kabul airport. [custom_adv] By the time he arrived with troops to secure the site, looters had broken in and carried away many items that the soldiers had left behind - including laptops, stereo speakers, bicycles and guitars which were being hawked from second-hand shops by Sunday morning.General Kohistani said troops also left behind small arms and ammunition along with hundreds of military vehicles and thousands of civilian cars and trucks, though many do not have the keys needed to start them. He has also inherited Bagram prison and its roughly 5,000 inmates - mostly believed to be Taliban. [custom_adv] It comes as Joe Biden puts an end to America's 'forever war' with all US troops due to be out of the country by the symbolic date of September 11 - though commanders are on course to withdraw by the end of August. 'They (Americans) are completely out now and everything is under our control, including watchtowers, air traffic and the hospital,' a senior Afghan government official told Reuters. [custom_adv] Reuters journalists on Monday visited the heavily fortified compound, long a symbol of Western forces deployed to shore up the Afghan government against the Taliban's campaign to regain power after being toppled by a US intervention in 2001. [custom_adv] Dozens of vehicles left behind by the United States stood on the premises while others zipped around with Afghan officials and personnel coming to terms with operating the vast base. [custom_adv] Radars oscillated as soldiers stood on guard, and hundreds of Afghan security personnel moved into barracks that once housed US soldiers. [custom_adv] Where American entertainers had once visited to boost the morale of US troops, an Afghan soldier strummed a guitar, singing a Pashto language epic on the Afghan homeland, while other Afghan soldiers toured the grounds on bicycles. [custom_adv] 'We (heard) some rumor that the Americans had left Bagram ... and finally by seven o'clock in the morning, we understood that it was confirmed that they had already left Bagram,' Gen. Mir Asadullah Kohistani, Bagram's new commander said. [custom_adv] Before the Afghan army could take control, the airfield, barely an hour's drive from the Afghan capital Kabul, was invaded by a small army of looters, who ransacked barrack after barrack and rummaged through giant storage tents before being kicked out, according to Afghan military officials. [custom_adv] Kohistani insisted the Afghan National Security and Defense Force could hold on to the heavily fortified base despite a string of Taliban wins on the battlefield. [custom_adv] The airfield also includes a prison with about 5,000 prisoners, many of them allegedly Taliban. The Taliban's latest surge comes as the last US and NATO forces pull out of the country. As of last week, most NATO soldiers already had quietly left. [custom_adv] The last US soldiers are likely to remain until an agreement to protect the Kabul Hamid Karzai International Airport, which is expected to be done by Turkey, is completed. Meanwhile, in northern Afghanistan, district after district has fallen to the Taliban. In just the last two days hundreds of Afghan soldiers fled across the border into Tajikistan rather than fight the insurgents.